Games of skill and chance have an intrinsic excitement and entertainment value. Any game is greatly enhanced by a participant's ability to know how their performance compares in relation to other participants and/or to historical performance for the game throughout the contest. As with any game of skill, competition among friends, or with strangers of similar experience, or the ability at one's option, sometimes for an extra consideration, to compete in a separate team or individual contest, offers the opportunity of increased enjoyment and prizes.
Games of skill that rely on participation by watching an event on a television have potential latency issues since television signal reception is not synchronized nationwide. For example, a participant in Texas using a satellite dish network may experience a 3-second delay compared to an individual in California using a cable network. Also, there are delays between individuals attending a game live and those watching the game live on television. Furthermore, for taped programs, both those shown to viewers in time zones or those syndicated on a market-by-market basis, there are potential delay issues as experienced with the live broadcasts in addition to other possible differences in timing of the broadcasts.
To maintain user enjoyment and fairness for all participants in online gaming, relative advantages or disadvantages related to these delays must be neutralized. Historically various technologies have been employed to manage aspects of coordinating communications, actions and/or responses of multiple users online with respect to an event.
A device for time and location based gaming has been disclosed by Amaltis et al., wherein an activating and deactivating of a gaming device may be based on a duration of time related to activation and/or a location of a user of the gaming device (U.S. Pat. No. 8,162,756 B2, publication date Apr. 24, 2012; hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety).
A system and method to synchronize the processing of messages in areas of an execution graph affected by primitives where there is a potential for substantial delay is taught by Sanin et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 8,560,495 B1, published Oct. 15, 2013 (hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), wherein a continuous processing system identifies primitives with potential for delay, each potentially-delayed primitive that is not in a loop, the continuous processing system creates a “timezone” downstream of such primitive, the output(s) of the potentially-delayed primitive becoming an input to the timezone, the processing system then identifying all other inputs to the timezone and placing a synchronizer across such inputs.
Berg et al. disclose an apparatus and method for synchronizing a function among a large number of devices having different platforms, causing a large number of handheld devices to perform certain functions at or nearly at the same time, the apparatus configured to send an event to each device, receive a timepacket and send a return timepacket, thereby causing the device to receive the event and invoke the function after a delay. The method may include calculating loop return times on content with timepackets to determine latency and synchronizing multiple devices based on event times. (U.S. Pat. No. 8,312,173 B2, published Nov. 13, 2012; hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety).
Simon et al. disclose a method and system to facilitate interaction between and content delivery to users of a wireless communications network, including creating affinity groups of portable communication device users, and distributing targeted content to said users, wherein the user affinity groups may be formed by comparing user profiles with each other or with a predefined affinity group profile definition (U.S. Pat. No. 8,606,308, published Dec. 10, 2013, hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety).
Gerace (U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,396, published Dec. 8, 1998 and hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety) discloses an apparatus and network methods for targeting an audience based on psychographic or behavioral profiles of end users, wherein the psychographic profile is formed by recording computer activity and viewing habits of the end user.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,622,837, published Jan. 7, 2014 (hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), and issued to Harris et al., discloses various metrics that may be deployed in an active, passive, or hybrid validation architecture, wherein a computing device configured to monitor network game activity may identify an inconsistency between user game data and a particular game metric governing a particular aspect of the network gaming environment, including wherein an active or passive validation process may detect cheating or unusual behavior or activity via passive monitoring or active, random queries, or a combination of the two.
Robinson et al. disclose methods and apparatus for deriving a response time to a challenge in a network by receiving an executable package that includes a challenge, a response to the challenge, a first call to retrieve the challenge, storing the first call time, making a second call related to a response to the challenge, and deriving a response time based on a difference between the first call time and the second call time (US Patent Application, Publ. No. 20100029370 A1, Feb. 4, 2010; hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety).
U.S. Pat. No. 8,616,967 B2, issued to Amaltis et al. on Dec. 31, 2013 (incorporated herein in its entirety by reference hereby), discloses a gaming system that allows users to access applications via communication devices coupled to a wireless network, wherein gaming applications can include gambling, financial, entertainment service, and other types of transactions and the system may include a user location determination feature to prevent users from conducting transactions from unauthorized areas.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,149,530, issued Apr. 3, 2012 (incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), Lockton et al. disclose a methodology for equalizing systemic latencies in television reception in connection with games of skill played in connection with live television programming, wherein users can indicate access path; verified by sending questions to cell phones concerning commercials, station breaks and the precise time they are viewed, or utilizing other information only seen by these users, and wherein averaging responses from cohorts can be used to establish accurate “delta” and to avoid cheating, and including further broadcasting test-response signals to which users must respond; automating a monitoring system watching signals per various channel feeds for arrival times; and batching users together per their source path and time delay.
Musa, et al., in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/455,080, filed May 27, 2009 (herein incorporated by reference in its entirety), teaches a system and method for providing real-time interaction with a multimedia program being presented to a viewer having an interactive end-user communications device, wherein an applet is distributed to interactive end-user devices, the applet includes a timer, time stamps and a GUI, and the program synchronizing activation of the applet with a multimedia program being presented to the viewer, and wherein the applet generates, at a first predetermined time, a first interactive graphical user interface (GUI) on the end-user communications device, the GUI displays values associated with the multimedia program for real-time selection by the viewer.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,754,470 B2, issued to Hendrickson et al. on Jun. 22, 2004 (incorporated herein by reference in its entirety), discloses systems and methods for measuring wireless device and wireless network usage and performance metrics, wherein data gathering software installed on a wireless device collects device parametric data, network parametric data, and event data.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/012,363, filed by Robinson et al. on Jan. 31, 2008 (incorporated herein by reference in its entirety), discloses methods for deriving a response time to a challenge in a network, by retrieving a challenge from a program in a first call, making a second call to provide a response to the challenge, and then deriving a response times by differencing call times.
US Patent Application filed by Khorashadi et al. (Publication no. 20130084882 A1, filed Sep. 30, 2011 and published Apr. 4, 2013, and hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) discloses a method for developing “context-awareness” for how a mobile device is being used by exploiting crowdsourcing and device interaction to assist context determination. One or more remote servers receives location and/or other information from a mobile device and selects, from a list of possible activities, a smaller list of activities that a mobile device user is likely engaged in. As a context assistance server and/or context crowd source server adjusts to input from mobile devices, they can share this “learning” with the mobile devices by updating context recognition models used by the mobile devices themselves. The server can also use the information to adjust a model that it can provide to the mobile devices for download.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/345,143, filed Jan. 6, 2012 by Mate et al. (incorporated by reference herein in its entirety), teaches methods, apparatus and computer program for analyzing crowd source sensed data to determine information related to media content of media capturing devices. An example embodiment may utilize crowd sourced sensing to determine one or more focus points of interest in which a number of users point media capturing devices at areas of interest associated with the event(s) to capture the media content. In addition, an example embodiment may classify the focus points and may utilize the classification of the focus points to determine semantic information about the recording behavior of the users at the event(s).
Beyond the teachings of the foregoing references, there remains a need in the industry for improved systems and methods that can provide for analyzing information from multiple users in ways connected to multiple events and/or event elements, some of which events may be related to a user's response, and to be able to correct the information about the event elements as a result of analysis of the responses from a plurality of users. Furthermore, there is a need to maintain a reputation system amongst said plurality of users, both in order to resist or detect cheating attempts and also as a mechanism to keep score or to provide a scale to differentiate users based on level of skill, response time, accuracy, etc.
In addition, there is a need for continued improvement in managing user interactions online and in coordination with online games and/or other event-based and/or transaction-related implementations. There is a need for improved methods to reduce cheating and to synchronize user engagements. There is a need for improving the ability to utilize large numbers of input signals from crowdsourcing data to determine the existence of events and event elements, the factual nature of each element, the sequence of event elements, and the actual timing of event elements.